Blast radius
- Industry term
Blast radius is how far the damage from one failure or bad action could spread, counted in people, data, money, systems, and time.
Damage travels along connections. A change to something many people or systems rely on reaches all of them at once, a mistake nobody notices keeps spreading until someone does, and an effect that can't be undone stays at full size however fast it's caught.
Where you’ll meet it
You ask an agent to tidy your team's shared calendar by removing duplicate meetings. If it decides that every repeat of a weekly meeting counts as a duplicate, twenty people lose their standing meetings in one run.
What to do
- Check that your calendar sends deleted events to a trash folder that restores them.
- Ask the agent to list the meetings it would remove, without removing any.
- Let it clear one week, look it over, then continue a week at a time.
Easy to mix up
| Blast radius | Risk |
|---|---|
| No, only how far it spreads if it happens | Yes, risk weighs the odds along with the harm |
Check yourself
One agent task renames 300 files in your own downloads folder. Another changes one sharing setting on the folder your company uses for client contracts. Which has the larger blast radius?
Go deeperSplitting systems apart often protects more than extra sign-offs
Engineers borrowed the term from explosives, and cloud engineering uses it widely. A large service may be split into independent cells, each serving a slice of customers, so a fault in one cell leaves the others running.
A person approving each action is one way to contain damage, and it weakens once approvals arrive by the hundred and get clicked through. A small-radius task with good monitoring and an easy undo can run on its own, leaving people's attention for the few actions that could reach everyone.